Partch, Virgil Franklin, II (17 Oct. 1916-10 Aug. 1984), cartoonist known as "VIP," was born on St. Paul Island, Alaska, the son of Paul Chester Partch, a petty officer electrician in the U.S. Navy, and Anna Pavaloff. The family moved often to a succession of naval radio stations in Alaska and along the West Coast until Paul Partch retired from the navy in 1929, when they settled in Tucson, Arizona. While enrolled in Roskruge Junior High School, Virgil developed, entirely by accident, his famous nom de plume. He signed his drawings with his initials, but as he explained, "my writing wasn't so hot and the initials looked like V-I-P to my classmates" (Goldstein, p. 54).

While attending Tucson High School, Partch drew cartoons for the school newspaper, the Cactus Chronicle, and played football and basketball. He entered the University of Arizona in the fall of 1936 as an art major and worked on the campus humor magazine, the Kitty Kat. On completing his freshman year, Partch left Arizona for Los Angeles to enroll in the Chouinard Art Institute, a training school for the Disney Studios. After six months he took the Disney qualifying test but failed; he was subsequently hired in December 1937 as a messenger boy. He advanced to in-betweening, drawing the scores of incremental pictures that traced the movement of a figure from one key position to the next in an animated sequence, and then to assistant animator. He also worked briefly in the story department. In May 1938 Partch married Helen Marie Aldridge, an eighteen-year-old art student he had met at a party a month before. They had three children despite several intervals of separation.

On 29 May 1941 union organizers mustered a picket line at Disney. Partch took the opportunity the strike afforded him to leave animation and pursue magazine cartooning. He had previously sold a few jokes ("gags") to the New Yorker, and he soon sold his first cartoon to Collier's, which published it in the 14 February 1942 issue. The celebrated VIP signature, however, did not appear in the magazine until the 4 July issue. Partch also sold to the Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, This Week, and True, where he became a fixture of the magazine, decorating letters columns and articles.

Partch's manic artwork inspired much comment because of his nonchalance about ordinary anatomy. In his early cartoons, drawn with a supple brush stroke, bodies are drawn in simple outline, lumpish shapes without modeling or anatomical detail, and people stand rigidly, feet braced far apart, arms dangling meaninglessly at their sides. Heads are all nose and chin: noses, all large and pointed, jut out from the top of the skull without pausing for foreheads and are punctuated on either side by tiny pop eyes. Mouths bristle horselike with bared teeth. In later years anatomy became more angular, noses got larger, eyeballs bulged more, heads acquired sharply rectangular shapes with ponderous lantern jaws, and Partch's line evolved into brittle whimsicality. To the frequent observation that he supplied his characters with too many fingers on their hands, Partch responded: "I draw a stock hand when it is doing something, such as pointing, but when the hand is hanging by some guy's side, those old fingers go in by the dozens. And why not? At Disney [Walt Disney]'s studio, I spent four years drawing three fingers and a thumb. I'm just making up for that anatomical crime" (Partch, It's Hot in Here, cover).

Partch's sense of humor was as wildly distorted as his rendering of human anatomy. "VIP's gags," Joel Goldstein said, "while seeming to take place in the mundane world, subvert all the trappings of realism and the familiar, taking us to a place where the extreme meets the literal" (Goldstein, p. 52). In one classic specimen a man is soaked to the skin because it is raining only under the umbrella he holds open over his head. In another a man exercising on a rowing machine is startled to see shark fins protruding from the floor all around him. In his bathroom one morning, a man looking at his reflection sees only the back of his head.

Many of VIP's cartoons give a literal interpretation to a common expression. A man says of his pet, who is depicted with the head and front paws of a dog and, at the other end, the legs and buttocks of a human baby, "He's almost human." Two soldiers are seated at a bar, and one turns to another man, naked, on a nearby barstool and says, "We've been wondering why you're not in uniform." A bartender is filling a glass and the whiskey pours in a zigzag pattern; the thirsty patron watches angrily and says, "I ordered straight whiskey." Such cartoons offer a vivid demonstration of how the verbal and the visual blend in the classic gag cartoon manner, neither the words nor the pictures achieving a comedic meaning alone without the other.

Partch joined the army on 23 September 1944 and spent the remainder of World War II at Fort Ord, California, where he drew cartoons for the base newspaper, the Panorama. The first book collection of his Collier's cartoons, It's Hot in Here, was published in 1944, to be followed by sixteen more. While still in the service, Partch freelanced cartoons to magazines and illustrated ads for Wheaties cereal, Smith Brothers cough drops, Briggs pipe tobacco, and Squirt soda. After his discharge on 1 July 1946, Partch illustrated several bar guides and these, together with six thematic volumes he produced for Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, established VIP as the comic expert on booze and babes, exactly the cartoonist Hugh Hefner chose in 1954 to share the cover of the inaugural issue of Playboy with Marilyn Monroe. VIP's drawing of a cavorting naked lady appears small, compared to Marilyn, over the caption, "VIP on Sex."

In 1950 Partch moved from North Hollywood to Balboa Island, where he took up boating and joined the Balboa Island Sculling and Punting Club. Late in the decade the Partches moved to Corona Del Mar, where they built a house overlooking the ocean. In 1960 Partch began a syndicated newspaper feature called Big George. In 1977 he launched another syndicated strip, The Captain's Gig. Neither was at all VIPish. George was a typical loudmouthed irascible husband and father, a little heavyset with a pointy nose and a moustache--in short, an entirely conventional newspaper comic character displaying little evidence of the maniacal muse that animated VIP's magazine cartoons for two decades. Partch even eliminated the superfluous fingers that had always festooned his people's hands.

By 1971 VIP's eyesight, always marginal, was deteriorating rapidly. With the aid of a vision-enhancing apparatus used by engravers and watch repairmen, he could see well enough to produce his cartoons, albeit at a larger size than earlier in his career. He was two years ahead of his deadline on Big George when he and his wife were killed on Interstate Highway 5 just north of Los Angeles when his wife crashed their sedan into a slower-moving pickup truck.

A little of Partch's biography can be pieced together from the dust jackets of his books. Partch's books, in order of publication, include It's Hot in Here (1944), Water on the Brain (1945), Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player (illustrations, 1945), Bottle Fatigue (1950), Here We Go Again (1951), The Wild, Wild Women (1951), Man the Beast (1953), Today's Revolution in the Weather (illustrations, 1953), The Dead Game Sportsman (1954), Hanging Way Over (1955), Nowhere Near Everest (illustrations, 1955), Crazy Cartoons (1956), The Executive (illustrations, 1959), VIP Tosses a Party (1959), New Faces on the Barroom Floor (1961), Big George (1962), Cartoons out of My Head (1964), VIP's Mistake Book (1970), Relations in Strange Locations (1978), and VIP's Quips (1975). An extensive treatment of his life and career through 1949 is Joel Goldstein, "Inspired Idiocy: The Early Life and Work of Virgil Partch," Comic Art 6 (Spring 2004): 51-62. Philip W. Porter wrote a memoir about his friend, "VIP," Cartoonist PROfiles 31 (Sept. 1976): 30-37. Hank Ketcham, in his autobiography The Merchant of Dennis the Menace (1990), talks about Partch at Disney and as a syndicated cartoonist. An obituary is in the New York Times, 12 Aug. 1984.